Arianna Huffington may be the queen of the blogosphere, but she's not above taking dictation.

On a conference call with her last week, Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel started "going on about the writers' strike and what he was thinking," Huffington recently said while sipping coffee in the New York office of her Huffington Post blog.

"I said, 'That's a blog,'" she recalled, in her inimitable Greek accent. "And so he started dictating his blog."

Who was transcribing?

"I was," Huffington said.

If it's hard to imagine the elegantly dressed, carefully groomed Huffington taking dictation like an unwashed desk jockey straight out of The Front Page, adjust your thinking. For a well-informed insight, juicy scooplet of news, or boldfaced name that can draw more traffic to her electronic salon, she is willing to roll up her sleeves.

"Give me a good blog and I will take dictation," she purred, turning on her legendary charm.

Huffington's "just do it" attitude helps to explain why the Huffington Post has become one of the most popular political websites on the internet, with more than 4 million visitors per month, according to company officials. (Nielsen puts the figure at 1.4 million a month.) Two and a half years after launching the site to derision and even ridicule, Huffington has defied the naysayers and established herself as a power on the Web.

Huffington and her business partners are hoping to capitalize on what they call "the cascade effect" of Web news, while dodging the hazards of operating a website that relies heavily on the as yet unpaid labor of others.

Huffington knows that the site's greatest asset is its stable of 1,800 bloggers. While none blog for money, she is aware that some sort of remuneration may be in order. To that end, Huffington is toying with a revenue-sharing model that would let her bloggers direct a portion of the site's ad revenue to a charity of their choice.

These are pretty heady days for Huffington and her team, which includes new C.E.O. Betsy Morgan, top editor Roy Sekoff, and a few dozen twentysomethings who write and edit in the website's offices in the Soho district of Manhattan and in Los Angeles. (Disclosure: last year I wrote two music reviews for the Huffington Post. I was not paid.)

As the HuffPo's traffic has begun to snowball over the past several months, the site has expanded its coverage to include entertainment and business news, hired a team of paid reporters, and co-hosted a presidential debate. Last Friday, Huffington and crew introduced the comedy news site 236.com, a joint venture with Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Growing traffic has translated directly into growing revenue for Huffington Post, although the proprietor said it has yet to be consistently profitable.

"We are making money occasionally," Huffington said. "But we are not profitable in a sustained way yet. We have good months where we make money. We've just built our advertising team, so occasional profitability is about to become sustainable profitability."

Huffington declined to be specific about the finances of the company, which is private. "We're generating substantial revenue, but we have a lot of expenses" was about as detailed as she would get.

Although Huffington declined to discuss specific financial results, Fortune recently quoted an unnamed source estimating that the site is on pace to increase its annual revenue from $4 million this year to $7.5 million next year. (The same article quoted her as saying she prays an hour a day, an assertion she now says is mistaken.)

Company officials dismissed recent speculation about whether Huffington and other founders intend to cash out: There are no plans to either sell the company or take it public. "We're focusing on trying to build the business," a spokesperson said.

Morgan said she was "very pleased" with how the site has grown. It is the second most popular political website, after the conservative bulletin board Free Republic, according to Hitwise. "The trajectory is very solid," she said.

As traffic has grown, so has scrutiny. Some critics dismiss it as shallow. Others have attacked Huffington Post for what they perceive as a liberal bias, favoring stories that tend to be critical of conservatives, Republicans, and especially President Bush and the war in Iraq.

The issue is particularly important because Huffington Post is in the process of ramping up its original reporting. How can it claim to be an objective purveyor of news when it has been so critical of the current administration?

"That really is a very important question," Huffington said, "because your assumption is completely wrong. The editorial stance of the Huffington Post is to debunk the right-left way of thinking, which has become completely obsolete."

Referring to the defunct CNN talk show that popularized left-right screamfests, she said, "Crossfire the show has ended, but the Crossfire way of doing things has not."

She discounted the value of giving equal weight to both sides of every argument. "If you look at everything that way," she said, "you tend to give equal value to some pretty schlocky positions that have no foundation in truth."

Morgan, the C.E.O., described the Huffington Post approach as "covering the news in a 21st-century kind of way." In addition to new ideas about balance and fairness, that approach includes a new business model too.

In recent months, as it has become clear that the Huffington Post has the potential to make real money, some pundits have questioned whether it is fair that the site does not pay its bloggers.

In the same way she handles criticism of her website's politics, Huffington rejects the way the pay discussion has been framed.

"They're not 'our' bloggers," she said. "They blog because they want to.

"There is something about the internet that makes people want to engage, to have their views out there," she continued. "Think about the bloggers as op-ed page writers. No one writes an op-ed for the New York Times for the money. They're writing because they want their views out there.

"We provide the bloggers with a platform that gets a lot of traffic," she continued. "Theoretically they could have their own blog, but maintaining a blog is an enormous amount of work. And if they have 'another life' and another line of work, it's very hard to maintain a blog that gets traffic."

Even so, Huffington is not completely unreceptive to the idea of compensating bloggers in some fashion. One idea she is considering would connect her most popular bloggers to some share of the revenue generated by the ads next to their posts.

"We are looking at a model which would allow contributions to be made to a blogger's favorite charities," she said. "Our bloggers would choose a number of charities, and we're working out a revenue model which would allow money to be sent to those charities."

Will that be enough to keep the talent happy if HuffPo starts running deeply in the black? The proprietor had better hope so. After all, what would happen to the Huffington Post if all 1,800 of its unpaid bloggers decided to join the picket line alongside the Hollywood screenwriters who so incensed Ari Emanuel?

Huffington smiled. "We would have to write a lot more ourselves," she said.

Arianna Huffington wants to make Huffington Post
a force among news sites on the Web.

_{Photograph by: Deborah Feingold/Corbis Outline}